Over the course of my Reef Vlogs I've come to see two benefits to showing my failures. In reefing people can learn a lot from watching someone else's mistakes, simply because they won't repeat them. The other benefit is indicating to the viewers, "Hey look we all fuck up, it's fine." Because we all fuck up, and it is fine. You shouldn't feel bad about mistakes, and I shouldn't pretend that I don't make them.

As a YouTuber you are strongly disincentivized to ever hint at failure. You get so much shit for the smallest mistake. One guy strongly insisted that I should delete my iM1 video and redo it entirely because I misspoke and said "Yamaha" instead of "Korg" in the intro. I pinned that comment in effigy so you can read it and my reply. At the time I was fairly disheartened by his callousness. Now I view his comment as self-defeating. I don't think it benefits anyone by me pretending I'm somehow flawless.

All of this is a long-winded wind up to say, "Oops." I took an ambitious road as I tackled Model 15, and I failed.

Video Description:

Moog's Model 15 is a massive beast. In this Let's Play I focus on a couple of my favorite features! If you've enjoyed this series please consider supporting it by becoming a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/discchord If you'd prefer to help on a monthly basis, instead of per video, there is a monthly Patreon campaign: https://www.patreon.com/discchord_com (Patrons of both campaigns get the same benefits, including Ad Free viewing on the site!)

With the release of discchord v3.1 over the summer I got some great feature suggestions from you guys for discchord v3.2! I wrote every single one of them down. Then threw them all out because Apple's new App Store broke the shit out of their iTunes API. This site relies heavily upon the iTunes API for both the AppDB and news aggregation. With the iTunes API going wonky, I misreported a couple of updates as "news" when they were actually old updates that iTunes was erroneously reporting with new dates.

To prevent this from ever happening again, I completely rewrote huge sections of the site's backend to track app history independently from iTunes. This includes all price changes, updates, and if an app was pulled.

Rather than hide all of that good data in my administrative tools, I've made it a part of the AppDB! Now you can see which apps are being updated regularly and which apps are price bouncing.

What's new in discchord v3.2:

App History!

Wishlist

Price Alerts for sales on Wishlist

User Profile Tweaks

A fucking mountain of backend stuff

App History

The new App History may look familiar to AppShopper users. This is because Step 1 of the App History implementation was to scrape the hell out of AppShopper for all of their app history data. There are over 1,700 in the AppDB, and all of the iOS and macOS apps now have histories going back to 2010. Now whenever you go to any app in the AppDB you'll see the last 20 historical events.

While I was at it, I also stole AppShopper's idea for displaying other apps by a developer.

Wishlist

While you're on those AppDB pages you'll also notice a new Wishlist button in the top right for every app. This new feature will help you keep track of the apps you want, but aren't necessarily ready to buy. If an app on your Wishlist goes on sale the site will automatically email you to let you know! This is going to be super handy as we roll into Black Friday sales!

To make these price alerts work the site needs to actually know your email address. If you signed up for the site with Facebook or Twitter then the site doesn't know where to reach you. To fix that I've updated the profile page to let you change or add an email. Only you and I can see your email, no one else can or ever will!

User Profile Changes

While I was at it, I made some other improvements to the user profile pages. Previously you'd only see the last 10 comments and posts from a user, but I've now made that limitless. If you are viewing your own profile you'll also see any @Mentions as well as your Wishlist. This is a convenient place to manage your wishlist. You can unwish... dewish... you can remove apps here. Any apps that are currently on sale will be at the top of the list.

The site might get a little bumpy this weekend as I finalize some other secret stuff in the background. I've taken the price alert email thingy offline for just a couple days while I tweak that to make it pretty... and make sure it won't spam the shit out of anyone. But you can start adding apps to your wishlists now!

Help Me, Help You

I might actually end up losing money on this whole deal. A large portion of the site's income is through iTunes affiliate links. I get a fixed percentage of every sale. So when you buy apps on sale instead of full price that share is smaller. I'm also toying with the idea of spooling up a third server to help run the site backend stuff. This would make the price alerts much more timely because it could check more frequently. So to help me offset costs and losses, please consider becoming a Patron!

Patrons get a nice ad free experience on the site, and genuinely help me stay afloat! Win-win!

I loved Sunrizer dearly when it arrived on iOS in 2011. I can't begin to guess at how many times I've opened it in the years that followed. So I was excited to see BeepStreet's latest synth! Zeeon did not disappoint.

Video Description:

BeepStreet wowed us in the past with Sunrizer! Now their latest app, Zeeon, continues in that tradition with some epic sounds in an easy to use package! If you've enjoyed this series please consider supporting it by becoming a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/discchord If you'd prefer to help on a monthly basis, instead of per video, there is a monthly Patreon campaign: https://www.patreon.com/discchord_com

Ever since the release of the New™ iPad Pro models I've been receiving bug reports from readers experiencing odd headphone audio latency in music apps. This latency starts off small, and grows rapidly over time into a debilitating delay! This coincides with an odd digital noise from the headphone output on the new iPad Pros.

Apple Doesn't Care About Music Apps

Some adventurous members of the community updated to the iOS 11 beta and reported that this had solved their problems. So I didn't bother reporting on it; partly because I hoped iOS 11 would solve the problem for everyone, but mostly because me reporting on anything Apple is doing is like pissing into an oncoming wave and expecting that to stop the tsunami. In September, with the release of iOS 11, we discovered that this it did not fix the problem. So here I stand on firm ground with my fly open.

In addition to the latest iPad Pro models, we are now getting reports that iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus models are also affected by the noise issue... which is surprising since they don't even have a built-in headphone jack!

You can read through the horror stories on the Audiobus forum, and also on Apple's User Discussion forum. Lots of people have tried a lot of different "fixes" but these tend not to be a full solution for all users. Several users reported that they have less noise on hardware interfaces if they change the samplerate from 48k to 44.1k in their apps. And some users report this also fixes the noise issue on the headphone jack.

It Just Works

This has been an ongoing issue, with reports from users dating back to July, but Apple has yet to make any official statement on the matter. This despite some big names weighing in on the official Apple forum, like YouTuber Cuckoo. I would say that their silence was disappointing, but that would imply that I held some other expectation. After living in Apple's world for the last 6+ years, I have no such expectation. "It just works..." except when it doesn't. Then you're just fucked.

Let's Keep Kicking the Can Down the Road

iOS 11.1 beta 2 reportedly fixes these issues, at least on new iPad Pros. From the patch notes:

I think I finally pronounced Igor Vasiliev correctly in this week's Let's Play! I'm so proud of this one... I mean the video itself is good, but I'm really proud of getting his name right. I hate it when my fellow Americans casually butcher other peoples' names. That's not cool. With the MidiFire tutorial below, this is a Tim Double Feature!

Video Description:

SoundScaper is one of my favorite "experimental" sound design apps, and SynthScaper builds that into a more practical synth app! If you've enjoyed this series please consider making a gift by becoming a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/discchord If you'd prefer to help on a monthly basis, instead of per video, there is a monthly Patreon campaign: https://www.patreon.com/discchord_com